Hey everyone, I have a bunch of junk silver coins and when I went to coinflation.com, why does a silver dollar have more silver than $1 in silver quarters? Their all 90% and my only thought is that coinflation will account for average wear but otherwise I am pretty confused. If anyone knows thatd be great.
I just went here.... http://www.silvercoinstoday.com/silver-calculators/us-silver-coin-calculator/ and got these results: 20 war nickels ($1.00) = $36.28 10 dimes roosevelt or mercury = $23.32 4 Quarters = $23.32 2 Fifty cent pieces = $23.32 1 Silver dollar = $24.94 It seems war nickels will give you the best return for the same face value in coins. Weird.
Well, war nickles are bigger than dimes, which is one thing that makes them different, that and they are 35% silver, not 90% like everything but cents
It still makes no sense. The value of silver in a dime today ($2.3387) is more than in a war nickel ($1.8190), but when you have 20 war nickels vs. 10 silver dimes, the nickels will give you more money from silver content. Back in the day when silver was whatever price it was and they used silver to make coins, you could have melted down 20 nickels and sold the silver for more than a dollar......or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Well, you get 10 silver dimes in a dollar, but you get 20 war nickels. Just think: 2.338x10=23.38, but 1.819x20=36.28.
But it made no sense for the government to make coins that way, if the silver value of 1 dollar in nickels was worth more than 1 dollar in dimes. Or did it have something to do with copper? They (war nickels) were 56% copper. Copper was needed for the war. Was copper worth more than silver during the war?
The government doesn't need to make sense! Historically, I do not know if silver was overtaken by copper, but it was the nickel they were saving. Silver was not a war asset, so it probably lost value because it could not be shot or built into other weapons. Also, the nickel was used to replace the 1/2 dime, so making it bigger was okay, because nickel was cheaper. Since then, soda machine companies and such have had an effect, which could have been it, but I'm not sure.
First, nickels were larger than half dimes because nickel was much cheaper than silver. There was a major nickel miner with political clout, first he tried to get nickel in cents, then 3 cent pieces, but lastly got it in a replacement for a half dime. It was in there ever since. During the war, the nickel is what was precious, as it was critical for submarines. Putting silver in instead was possible because as Numisaddict said, silver was not a war asset. Silver dollars at least since Morgans had about .78 ounces of silver versus .73 ounces in a dollar of silver change. This makes sense since the Morgans and their large mintages were really meant to use up large amounts of silver flooding the market. Also, it is traditional for crown sized coins around the world to have higher silver content than minor coins.
You really need to read the description provided by coinflation of each coin. For example; it says a Morgan Dollar weighs 26,73 grams and is 90% silver a Mercury dime weighs 02.5 grams and is 90% silver. You will note that the Dollar weighs 10.69 times what the dime does. That means it has the same silver as 10.69 dimes. So of course it's more than 10 dimes worth of silver weight. A Washington quarter weighs 6.25 grams, so 4 of them weigh 25.0 grams. 1.73 grams LESS than the dollar. The mint never make the weights to be in an exact ratio of one another. So the silver content won't be in an exact ratio either.
